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Feb. 6, 2026 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
21:12
CRYPTO CARNAGE: Why Bitcoin's Proof of Work is Incompatible with the Power Needs of AI Data Centers
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Bitcoin's Power Problem 00:04:56
All right, Mike Adams here with my comments on Bitcoin and the current crypto crash or crypto carnage that's taking place.
Of course, being that it's crypto, we all know that there's carnage that happens every once in a while.
That's not the end of the world.
But this one is hitting people particularly hard, I think, because of the costs of living are so much higher now.
There's so much inflation.
Food is less affordable.
Rent is less affordable.
Insurance, etc.
Whereas a few years ago, people had more easy money floating around.
Now, every little dollar counts, it seems.
So a lot of people are really panicking as Bitcoin has plunged from $120,000 to now about $65,000 last time I checked before I started this recording.
So it's almost lost 50% from its high.
For Bitcoin, that's not unusual, though.
It can happen.
It has happened.
There's been plunges of 70% or 80%.
But I do think something is changing on a permanent basis.
And it has to do with power usage.
And so my thesis of what's happening is that the powers that be, the political powers that be, they realize that for America to be competitive with China in the all-important race to AI supremacy, that Bitcoin uses just way too much power.
You know, the hash rate requirements for the consensus mechanism of the blockchain, the mining, as it's called, it just uses so much power.
It's as much power as an entire nation.
And in America right now, we don't have excess power.
The Eastern power grid is toast.
It's already maxed out.
And even though there's still excess power in the Western grid and in Texas, that's getting used up very quickly by these AI data centers that are going in.
And yes, the AI data centers are losing money.
That's beside the point.
At a national level, they don't care if the AI loses money.
This is about a race to superintelligence as a weapon system.
It's not about always making revenue with the AI.
It's about beating China to super intelligence.
But literally, the only way to be competitive in the AI race is for America to stop funneling so many gigawatts of power into crypto data centers and instead make that available for AI data centers.
And it can literally be the same data centers.
You just switch it over from crypto mining to AI.
Now, granted, that's different hardware, but it's the same power.
And in terms of a strategic national plan, this is actually necessary.
So when you look at this massive sell-off of Bitcoin, you know, Trump is selling off Bitcoin.
His company sold $5 million.
BlackRock, hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin.
All the top exchanges, Binance, Kraken, Coinbase, a bunch of them, they're all selling millions of dollars of Bitcoin.
They are unloading Bitcoin like crazy.
No one's ever seen this kind of a coordinated sell-off of Bitcoin before.
And did I say Binance too?
Yeah, Binance is selling off all kinds of stuff.
A lot of people have concerns about Binance right now.
The point is that what if this really is coordinated?
What if an order came down from the higher ups that said, look, we got to ditch Bitcoin because it's using too much power.
Just flat out, it's using too much power for this nation.
Bitcoin isn't really helping the government.
The government can't counterfeit Bitcoin.
That's one of the advantages of Bitcoin is that it can't be counterfeited by any government, unlike dollars or Euros.
But it wouldn't be difficult for government to look at Bitcoin and say, you know, it's not serving our purposes.
We're going to roll out something as a replacement anyway, which will be a centralized CBDC that doesn't need a high hash rate blockchain.
Yeah, it might still be blockchain, but it'll be a very limited blockchain distributed to only a few participating selected partners like JP Morgan.
So it might be a blockchain with a consensus pool of like seven.
You know, there's seven different copies of the blockchain.
So you don't need a hash rate, hardly anything.
And since the government wants centralized control over your digital money, they certainly don't need a decentralized system that uses a high hash rate and a lot of power in order to achieve proof of work.
Limited Blockchain Consensus 00:14:35
And essentially, what I'm saying here is that the entire concept of proof of work, which was genius in 2011, has become such a beast in terms of power consumption that is no longer compatible with the power distribution requirements of an AI-driven economy.
Now, you know, through the 2010s, let's say, when Bitcoin was really rising and taking off in years like 2017, et cetera, we had extra power.
We had plenty of extra power during those years because that was before AI data centers.
And in fact, NVIDIA was known for making the GPUs that people would use for crypto mining.
That actually launched NVIDIA, really.
It was, you know, at first it was video games in the early 2000s, and then it was crypto mining.
And then it became AI.
And almost all the sales of the high-end GPUs from NVIDIA now are used not for video gaming, but for AI.
And I know because I'm one of their repeat customers.
I just bought several, what is it, the 50-80 cards because it's, it's, I mean, they've got very high inference rates.
I use them for all our in-house data pipeline processing.
But these cards are going in place.
I'm going to be using them for text-to-speech to generate full-length audio books for our book project at brightlearn.ai, where we already have over 30,000 free books that are published and downloadable for free.
But we're going to start churning out audio books.
So I bought a bunch of NVIDIA cards just for the audio.
Well, I had to upgrade the existing workstations.
They've been running, what, like 40, 70 cards, a lot of them.
And I'm upgrading them to 5080 cards, which is the Blackwell class microprocessors.
It has much more AI inference throughput.
But my limitation locally is power.
I'm out of circuits.
You know, I can only run so many workstations with the GPUs and then I start blowing breakers because I have kind of a like a mini data center that I'm running myself.
And, you know, the building wasn't built to be a data center.
So, you know, maxing out the 200 amps of the breaker box or whatever it is.
It's all maxed out.
And that's happening at a national level for America.
And remember that America is way behind China when it comes to annual aggregate power generation.
China has over 10,000 terawatt hours per year.
The US has only 4,400 or so, even though that is slowly getting larger.
China's number is rapidly getting much larger.
So since power is really the bottleneck for AI, it's not microchips anymore, it's power, then the lack of power in the United States is killing us in the AI race.
So again, it goes back to Bitcoin.
Bitcoin's hogging so much power that it's just off the charts.
And so I don't know how familiar you are with the Bitcoin, the hash rate mechanism, but here's actually how it works, or at least this is my understanding.
That let's say if the government were to crash the Bitcoin price, or whoever's behind this, maybe they were to crash it down to like $20,000 a coin, then most of the existing miners would go out of business and thus they would stop mining.
And then because the difficulty, the hash rate that's necessary to mine Bitcoins is self-adjusting.
At least this is my understanding.
You can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but it's self-adjusting.
As more and more hash rate is fed into the consensus system, the difficulty rises.
But if a lot of miners go offline and there's less hash rate going into the system, then the difficulty reduces and then it takes less power to run the blockchain.
Now, that's my understanding.
I think I'm right about that, but there may be some details that I'm missing.
So feel free to correct me in the comments if I didn't get that entirely correct.
So assuming that's correct, again, I think it is, then the easiest way for the powers that be to reduce power consumption for Bitcoin is to crash the price and put a bunch of miners out of business.
And then given that a lot of those miners are on the Eastern grid, that frees up Eastern Grid power availability for the data centers, the data centers that the CIA is trying to bring online and the DOD is trying to bring online.
So this whole thing could be a DOD operation, frankly.
I'm not trying to turn every conversation into a conspiracy theory, but the DOD is probably saying to themselves, you know, my God, this is a national security issue.
We need this power.
We need the power on the Eastern Grid.
You know, it's going to take 15 to 20 years to build power plants or nuclear plants.
The gas turbines have a 10-year wait time now.
You know, the solar panels, yeah, we can buy them, but we don't have all the land that we need, you know, the farmland for the solar.
We need to power these data centers.
What's the fastest way to provide power to data centers?
Shut down existing power demand.
And that's where Bitcoin enters the picture.
Now, even if that's not the case of what's happening right now, because again, that's just conjecture on my part.
That's a, you know, maybe this is happening.
But in the long run, the very design of Bitcoin is incompatible with a society or a civilization that has power scarcity.
And if you think about what's actually happening right now with more and more electric vehicles coming online and more and more AI data centers, I believe we are entering an era where the blockchain hash rate requirement of Bitcoin is just flatly incompatible with the power grid strains that we are now experiencing.
And I know that there are other mechanisms of consensus.
There's proof of work and there's also proof of stake.
Proof of stake tends to concentrate power into the hands of a few, you know, a few founders typically.
But then again, Bitcoin is also concentrated into the hands of a few whales.
So proof of work did not actually achieve mass decentralization as it was designed to achieve.
There's just a few people that own most of the Bitcoin, and there's a few people that control almost all the Bitcoin code.
And you're probably familiar with the blockchain size wars that Roger Veer and Aaron Day and others have correctly stated that the good guys lost and the bad guys won.
And as a result, Bitcoin became essentially useless for small everyday transactions because the blockchain size is too limiting.
And that's on purpose.
It's a deliberate engineered bottleneck to prevent Bitcoin from ever replacing cash.
And that was all engineered into the system by the controllers of Bitcoin.
And some people even suspect there might be backdoors built into Bitcoin.
We don't have any proof of that.
The code is supposed to be open source and it's supposed to be decentralized, but really it's just a couple of companies that control all the code also.
And with the Epstein files being released, there's a lot of people who are suspicious that Israel or Mossad might have backdoors built into it because of the history of exploding pagers.
You know, Israel is known to infest supply chains with spyware or remote detonation systems or remote control systems.
The CIA did that.
Mossad did that with the CIA and the NSA in the creation of the Stuxnet virus back in the early 2000s.
There are many other cases of this where both the U.S. and Israeli governments, especially, have weaponized infrastructure and built-in backdoors.
So it's not an unreasonable suspicion.
It's just that we don't have any absolute proof that that exists.
But people are concerned about that.
And then on top of that, some videos are circulating of some well-known people saying, oh, if you knew who was behind Bitcoin, you would sell every coin you had because you could not sleep at night if you really knew who was behind it, which sounds like Epstein and Mossad.
Again, that's not proof, but it is those are some of the concerns that are circulating right now that may be feeding into the selling pressure of Bitcoin.
Especially in this age of crypto surveillance, more and more people want privacy coins like Monero or Xano.
Of course, Monero and Xano are also falling at the same time that Bitcoin is falling, because Bitcoin is the anchor.
It's the rising or falling tide.
And all ships sink if the tide is going out.
And that's what's happening with Bitcoin right now.
But for people who don't want to be spied on by their governments, privacy tokens or privacy coins are a far better alternative because Bitcoin is a surveillance coin.
And who's surveilling you?
Well, you know, probably the pedophiles because that's who's running everything, including our own government at this point.
That's who's running the DOJ.
That's who's running the FBI.
That's who's running the banks.
I mean, come on.
You know, we don't have to pretend anymore that the pedophiles run most of the world.
And they're being given a free pass by the Trump administration.
So what does that tell you, huh?
Anyway, look, if you're in Bitcoin and you want to get out, you can swap it for other crypto.
You can swap it for gold-backed crypto tokens.
I think that the two most popular gold tokens that they claim are all backed by gold, but you should do your own research is Tether Gold.
But I don't trust Tether at all because Tether's tied to, you know, all the same people in the Epstein files, it seems, like Howard Luttnick, for example.
And then there's also Paxos Gold, which is, I think that those are ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum blockchain.
And that's tied to audited physical gold that's stored in vaults in Switzerland, maybe or somewhere in Europe.
I don't know.
That's my understanding.
But do your own research.
You can tell.
I don't have every detail nailed down on all these tokens.
So do your own research and do what's best for you.
Or you might just want to choose to hang on to your Bitcoin if you've got Bitcoin.
You might say, well, you know, hey, it's gone down before.
It's always recovered.
You know, this is just another selling panic and we should all not panic and just hoddle and chill, right?
At least that's the Michael Saylor mantra.
Hoddle and chill.
Okay, fine.
Nothing wrong with that if that's what you want to do.
This is a time when there's risk everywhere.
There's even risk in gold and silver, although I would say gold is holding up very nicely, still sitting just below 5,000.
And silver, despite the volatility, it's between like $75 and $85 right now, which is extraordinary considering where it was just a year ago at $30.
So, you know, the metals are doing very well.
Crypto is not doing well.
Stock market's not doing well.
There's even a IT stock market bubble popping, some people say.
And a lot of software companies are bursting because there's too much leverage in the system.
So at the end of the day, what are you going to end up with?
What are you going to be able to hold?
At the end of the day, when everything's crashing, you're going to have ounces of gold, ounces of silver, maybe some privacy tokens, maybe some land, maybe a house, a roof over your head, a vehicle, some physical stuff, some stored food, some diesel fuel, a couple of good batteries for your power tools or whatever you have, a bunch of ammo and a few rifles.
That's what you're going to end up with because the whole system is coming down.
It really is.
The Western banking system is going to fail.
The dollar is going to fail.
The U.S. debt market is going to fail.
It's just a question of when and sort of how mad max does that look when it happens.
And I don't have the answers to that.
I don't have the timing.
That's why I urge everybody to pre-position yourself.
Be ready for this because you can see there are cracks in the dam.
The system is starting to crater.
So the smart play in my mind right now is still in metals.
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Some people believe right now is a really great discount buying opportunity.
But do your own research because I'm not your financial advisor.
Buy Gold, Not Bitcoin 00:01:37
And, you know, look, metals could go down even more than they are right now.
But I just bought, I bought quite a lot of silver at $76, and I'm happy with that.
And I would buy more if it goes lower, personally.
And here's my final question to you.
At what point will gold be higher than Bitcoin?
That is, will an ounce of gold cost more than one Bitcoin?
So if gold goes to 10,000 and Bitcoin also drops to 10,000, then they're the same price.
I think we're going to see a day when gold is higher than Bitcoin.
And again, I don't know when, I don't know at what level they cross, but gold's going to continue to skyrocket because of dollar printing and devaluation of the failed U.S. Empire currency.
And Bitcoin is, I think, going to continue to be de-emphasized, especially by institutional investors, because of now the extreme high volatility and the intense power usage, as I've mentioned here.
So that's my prediction.
Gold will surpass Bitcoin in terms of the price per ounce versus per coin.
Will that happen in 2026?
I don't know, but I think it's going to happen.
So, you know, plan accordingly and make up your own mind and do what's best for you.
Thanks for listening.
Take care.
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